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Some dying octopus gets covered on TV, for Christ’s sake

Confirmation that you are not mad, it’s the world around you, emerged this week when every British television channel carried a story about some bloody animal with tentacles dying in its tank in Germany.

The octopus, which was called ‘Paul’ for fuck’s sake, had apparently managed to pick a mussel out of two alternative boxes nine times in a row, correctly ‘predicting’ nine results in the World Cup at odds far higher than those of any mainstream media reporting anything newsworthy. Except it didn’t, of course, because it was a friggin’ octopus and thus incapable of abstract decision-making.

Defending the decision to run the story, Adrian Chiles said: ‘Oh, all right, so would you really prefer yet another filler about who Wayne Rooney’s shagging this week?’ ITV’s Daybreak programme later imploded after running a report suggesting that Rooney had in fact paid for sex with the aging cephalopod.